In my inexperience, I raised my voice – just a little, just enough, I hoped, to be heard over their noise. Most readers will know what happened next. They raised their noise level; not a lot, just enough to make me go a bit higher. And so it went on, step by step, until a moment when both sides must have been stopping for breath at the same time. In that short silence, I heard the quiet boy at the right-hand end of the front row, who had been observing the whole circus around him, saying “Izwi rashe idiki”.
I don’t know whether the other boys heard him. He may have meant it only for me. I took the lesson to heart and tried to live it from then on. After all, there’s a truth there that applies in many situations outside the classroom. And there are too many people in this world who haven’t learned that simple schoolroom lesson.
Why do so many people in Zimbabwe shout so much? It seems to be everyone’s way of asserting strength. In fact it only shows they do not trust their moral authority. I admit that in that classroom I never thought that I had the moral authority which would have silenced the class rather quickly if I had waited in silence for them to become quiet. I should have known that if I had reflected on good teachers I had known and how they differed from the bad ones.
The bad ones did far more shouting and used the stick or other corporal punishment more, but they only proved that those methods do not produce better exam results or better classroom discipline. The bad teachers did not trust the moral authority they would have had if they had behaved according to the best professional standards. Many of the people we hear shouting in our streets, bars and other public places do not only mistrust their own moral authority; they know they have none.
That is serious. Police whose commanders announce publicly that they will not obey our elected government know that they have no moral authority, because they themselves do not recognise legitimate authority. They have to enforce their rules by shouting and battering people because they are not seen by the people as the servants of the law, which should be a set of reasonable rules that we have all agreed to live by. Everyone knows that they are making up half the rules they invoke to justify their demands for bribes; that does not give them any moral authority.
In short, all this shouting, whether the person shouting is an under-age grey bomber, a drunken sergeant, a police commissioner, high army officer or the minister of (in)justice himself, does not show the strength of the person shouting, but their weakness.
They know their position is weak and that is why they shout, to hide their fear.
Our country is full of people shouting at the top of their voices. Don’t fear them; remember that the very fact that they shout shows they are more afraid than you are. They have reason to fear. Change is in the air; none of us know just what sort of change and what it will bring, but change is inevitable.
You and I don’t have much reason to fear change. After all, things couldn’t get much worse, could they? But those who have grown fat by plundering government property and the property of anyone they could frighten, they have every reason for fear. They have more to lose.
It might not be tactful to ask them what they fear. Anyway, you know the answer, and there lies your strength.
Post published in: Opinions & Analysis